On This Terror Plot: Is the FBI Busting Its Own Conspiracies?

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The arrest of Rezwan Ferdaus — a 26-year-old man living in Ashland, Massachusetts, with a degree from Northeastern University — on charges that he was fashioning an elaborate plot to attack various sites in Washington both by himself, and through explosives delivered by drone aircraft, is being touted by both the FBI and various members of Congress as a landmark case in what they are calling "homegrown terrorism." Up until now, "homegrown terrorism" has been a phrase reserved for people like Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, and Kevin Harpham, who tried to do the same to the Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane last January. In other words, "homegrown terrorism" meant rightwing violence either in fact, or in actual attempt.

Now, though, what is being called "homegrown terrorism" is being applied to Ferdaus, an America citizen who is a Muslim. And certainly, if the FBI is to be believed — which is always a very big if, especially in Boston, as history has taught us — Ferdaus had it in him to be a very bad actor. If the FBI is to be believed, he had every intention of carrying out his plans. If the FBI is to be believed, he spouted off extensively to FBI agents whom Ferdaus believed were recruiters for Al Qaeda. He bought cellphones to be used as detonators. On Wednesday, he took delivery of what he believed to be weapons and explosives, which is when the FBI busted him. The Justice Department even helpfully supplied a photo of a model of a Sabre jet of the type it says Ferdaus planned to use to deliver his explosives.

Before this, Ferdaus apparently was an unremarkable sort who played in a couple of local rock bands, including one called The Goosepimp Orchestra. His only previous brush with the law was getting popped for vandalism when he was in high school. If the FBI is to be believed, Ferdaus first took the leap from high-school prankster to international man of evil in January, when he told an FBI snitch that he wanted to attack the Pentagon with his drone aircraft. It was the snitch who introduced Ferdaus to the undercover FBI agents who then set about pretending to enable Ferdaus and his grand scheme.

Ferdaus is only the latest person arrested by the FBI for being part of what they believed to be an enterprise — terrorist or otherwise — in which his "partners" actually were FBI agents themselves. (There is no evidence yet presented that Ferdaus did anything except run his mouth prior to meeting the two counterfeit jihadis who worked for Uncle Sam.) The pattern is now familiar. There is an announcement at maximum volume. The suspect is usually described as being fully dedicated — and fully capable — of carrying out the plans he is charged with making. And, as a bonus, all the psychological alarms that the country has been carrying around since 9/11 begin to rattle to life again. The problems arise when the cases fall part, as several of them have, or when the question arises as to whether or not the FBI is simply busting its own conspiracies. When the cases fall apart, or when they turn out to be rather less serious than the original blare of publicity would have had the nation believe, the news is often buried, but the fear and the political utility of the original announcement remain.

The dynamic is a troubling one. If the FBI is foiling genuine plots, it is to be commended. If it is simply enabling the megalomania of troubled people and enmeshing them in plots of the Bureau's own devising, it is coming very close to a textbook example of entrapment. Consider two cases: that of Harpham, the Spokane bomber, and that of Mohamed Mohamud, whom the FBI arrested for what they said was his plan to set off a bomb at a Christmas tree lighting in Portland. Harpham did it all on his own. He was completely off the radar until they was arrested, and he was arrested partly because the FBI noticed he'd been buying an unusual number of fishing weights. (Harpham planned to use the sinkers as shrapnel.) By contrast, Mohamud did nothing but talk until he got together with his FBI handlers. He had only motive and opportunity at that point. The FBI helped supply the means.

And that's not even to consider the fallout of what would happen if some guy the FBI had on its string went out and blew something up anyway. Since 9/11, law enforcement has enjoyed the benefits of a thousand doubts in this area. But it would take only one turn of the dial for at least some of our perfervid citizens to turn an event like that into a tangled welter of conspiracy theories. The precedents from Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the 9/11 Truther precedents — to say nothing of the granddaddy of them all, the FBI's shadowy history with a certain Mr. Oswald — are not encouraging in this regard.

By now, the country ought to be vigilant and skeptical about terrorism. We've seen the results of what happens when presidents neglect their summer reading on the topic, but we've also seen what happens when people use the threat of terrorist attack for their own purposes. It is an irresistible temptation to political grandstanding on the part of both Democrats and Republicans. The Obama administration is simply less hysterically obvious on the topic than the preceding administration was. At the very least, it's treating terrorism as a law-enforcement matter, which it is, and for which John Kerry got excoriated during the 2004 campaign. The one thing we all ought to be very cautious of is falling into the kind of Enemy Within thinking that inevitably arises out of events like the arrest of Rezwan Ferdaus.